LazyCode

So in all 5 minutes of my free time I've managed to squeeze in some side projects. One I've "highlighted" (pun intended) here before: lzHilight. The other is a mini-project I through together to add cterm support to Vim colorschemes without the need for the somewhat bulky GuiColorScheme plugin.

lzHilight has been my baby for a long time but I've only been actively developing it for the past couple months or so. It's definitely the biggest personal project I've worked on aside from this site and I'm really proud of how quickly it has come along. It accomplishes exactly what I planned: Simple for people that just wanted a syntax highlighter and powerful/extensible for the people that want to get their hands dirty.

I've learned alot from the highlighter projects, like how to implement really shitty finite state machines in PHP. The JS lexer was particularly interesting to build because it was the first actual language that I made a lexer for from scratch. I built the HTML/CSS lexers from scratch but they were markup languages and quite a bit simpler and the PHP lexer was just built-in. The problem I'm sidestepping at the moment is the need for the implementation of branching state in the JS lexer due to Javascript's regular expression notation.

The second project was something that was born out of code from the highlighter: Vim-toCterm. For a while I used the guicolorscheme plugin mentioned above with my Skittles Dark colorscheme mentioned below which worked well but it would act strangely when changing colorschemes. The result of a very tiny irritation was a set of scripts and a PHP port of a C++ HTML→xterm approximation library that, when executed on an existing Vim colorscheme with HTML colors will add cterm approximations which become part of the colorscheme and the need for guicolorscheme sort of floats away.

A project too small to be actually called a project but the most "successful" of the three is the colorscheme I created for Vim: Skittles Dark. I say "successful" because according to the script's page as of today it has only gotten 804 downloads compared to the other two which I could count the downloads on two hands. Just for kicks I googled around for the scheme to see if anyone was using it and it came up in a few github hosted .vimrc's and it made me smile. One of the reasons I've always loved programming and open source in particular is the fuzzy feeling you get when you see others enjoying something you've created.

Where to find the projects

lzHilight

• Github Repo: lzHilight
• Project Page: lzHilight

• Vim.org Page: Skittles Dark

• Vim.org Page: tocterm
• Github Repo: Vim-toCterm